Lost Voices Found: An Archaeology of Contentious Politics in the Greater Southwest, A.D. 1100 - 1450

Abstract

This dissertation uses a relational approach and a contentious politics framework to examine the archaeological record. Methodologically, it merges spatial and social network analyses to promote a geosocial archaeology. Combined, the articles create a counter-narrative that highlights how environmentally focused investigations fail to explain how and why societies in the Southwest often reorganize horizontally. The first article uses geosocial networks, which I argue represent memory maps, to reveal that the socially important, and sophisticated, act of forgetting was employed by people in the Gallina region during A.D. 1100 - 1300. A concomitant community level, settlement pattern analysis demonstrates similarities between the arrangement of Gallina and Basketmaker-era settlements. These historically situated settlement structures, combined with acts of forgetting, were used by Gallina region residents to institute and maintain a horizontally organized social movement that was likely aimed at rejecting the hierarchical social atmosphere in the Four Corners region. The second article proposes that as ideologically charged material goods are consumed, fissures within past ideological landscapes are revealed and that these fissures can demonstrate acts of resistance in the archaeological past. It also contends that social and environmental variables need to be combined for these conflicting religious and political practices to be correctly interpreted. The third article applies many of the ideas outlined in the second article to a case study in the Greater Southwest during A.D. 1200 - 1450. Fractures in the ideological landscape demonstrate that the Salado Phenomenon was a religious social movement formed around, and successful because of, its populist nature. Based on variations in how the Salado ideology interacted with contemporaneous hierarchical and non-hierarchical religious and political organizations it is probable that the Salado social movement formed around desires for the open access to religious knowledge.